Overview
Where the Wizard is one of the most powerful attributes of Best Choice 4.0., reindexing is the engine behind it. If your data is not reindexed, then your Wizard searches are not going to be accurate. The best way to describe this is to look at how a book works. Pete Hoyt gives a great analogy for this, and I will describe it here.
Most books have an index in the back. This index keeps information on where to go in the book to find certain words or subjects. Now, imagine what would happen if the author of the book decided to add more pages of information to each chapter without updating his index in the back. Of course, the index would give wrong information every time you wanted to look up certain words or subjects.
Our program works the same way. Best Choice 4.0 has a large database of over 8,000 stocks. In our database is an index, just like an index in a book.You can liken a stock to a chapter in a book. Each day, you download new price information for each stock, so in a sense, it is like you are adding new pages to each chapter. As you do this, the stock price data gets updated, but our database index does not get updated automatically. That is what our Reindex screen does. It re-indexes our database index to reflect all the current stock price data.
Getting Started
It is very simple to start the re-indexing process. Just click the green "Start" button.This process will take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour depending on the speed of your computer. You can get a pretty good idea of how long it will take as soon as you click the "Start" button, because a timer will show you how long you have left. Wait about 15 seconds after it starts to get a more accurate idea of how long it will take because the more records it goes through, the better the program can determine how long it will take. Once this process is finished, you will see
If you primarily are a long term trader, and don't do short term searches in the wizard, you can tell the program not to reindex short term data. This will allow the reindexing to finish faster. Just click the box with the check mark next to "Calculate" in the Short Term Frame When you click the box, it will take the check mark out, telling the program that you do not want to reindex for short term data.
If you are the opposite, a primarily short term trader, and have no interest in doing long term searches in the wizard, you can click the box next to "ReIndex Long Term" in the Long Term frame. Clicking this will take the check mark out of the box and tell the program that you do not want to reindex the long term data, and will speed up the reindexing.
How often do I have to do it?
Depends on how much you want (and need) to use the wizard. There are a couple of different scenarios. First of all, it is a good idea to reindex the database before you use the wizard so that you will have the most up to date information possible. It is also a good idea to download the latest data before you reindex. BUT, and there are always exceptions, lets say you re-indexed the database last night, and tonight, you want to do a different type of search in the wizard than you did last night. You don't really need to re-index again, because although the data changes from day to day, it is not enough to really change the results from one day to the next.
For short term searches in the wizard, you really only need to reindex the database MAYBE once a week. For example, say you wanted to find all the excellent short term trading stocks. Lets say on Tuesday after you downloaded that day's data you reindexed the database and did a search for excellent stocks using the wizard. You could wait until the next Tuesday after you downloaded that days data to reindex the database and do another search. But even then, you may only see four or five new stocks. If you wait two weeks between reindexes and searches, you will see more stocks returned. It is up to you how often you want find new stocks and how many new ones will be returned.
For long term searches in the wizard, once a month is all you really need to do it. Another example would be for long term traders looking for 50/50 stocks in the wizard. Lets say in March you did a search and the wizard returned 30 great long term 50/50 stocks. You could wait at least a month before you would need to reindex and use the wizard to find more 50/50 stocks. Even then, you would probably wouldn't find more than four or five new stocks. For long term searches, the data does not change very quickly at all.
After you have made changes to the program options.
You will have to reindex the database before you search using the Wizard if you have made changes to any of the following areas under the Program Options.
The reason is this. Lets say you went into the Short Term Ratings and changed the way the ratings work in the program. Now you want to do a search for all the Good and Excellent stocks that meet the criteria you just created in the Short Term Ratings. Well, even though you have made the changes in the Program Options, the database indexes still reflect the old ratings criteria, or whatever changes you did make in one of the four areas above. So now we need to reindex the databases using the new criteria you just selected, so when you do a search using the Wizard, the databases will reflect your new criteria.
All information Copyright Best Choice Software 1998-2001
For more information about this website, email webmaster@bestchoicesoftware.com